Strategy and focus
I help you pick the one thing that matters. The rest can wait. Or never happen at all.
personal site · 2026 edition
DmitriiSergeev
Building AI-first companies.
founder · creator · advisor
Building SaaS since 2012. Took Carrot Quest from zero to $3M ARR. No investors, still 35% growth a year.
Building Dashly. An AI SDR for inbound B2B SaaS funnels. Picks up every website inquiry in seconds: chat, demo requests, product signups. Qualifies, books the meeting, and gets the lead to actually show up. Runs across web chat, WhatsApp, Telegram, and email. The core is a Data Layer, not prompts: website behavior, every past conversation, CRM, external enrichment. North Star Metric: meetings held between qualified leads and sales.
/ 01 / bio
Marketing, product and sales. One system.
In most companies product, marketing and sales live on different floors. I never worked like that. At the center of all three sits a conversation with the customer. That's why I build them together, and why I push teams to build bridges between each other. In my first company I shipped the product, ran sales, and wrote the copy myself. Never unlearned it.
My first business was Anivers, a web studio I started in 2009. Clients were Sberbank, Rosneft, Imperial Tobacco. I left the agency world for SaaS once it was clear that custom dev, design, and marketing don't scale and burn the team. Carrot Quest came next. Now Dashly.
AI-first in the product, AI-first in the process. The artifacts that fall out of that stream live here.
Right now I'm Founder & CEO Dashly, Founder & Advisor Carrot Quest.
/ 02 / numbers
01$3MARR at Carrot Quest0 → 1000+ customers, no funding, 35% growth a year.
0214+years in SaaS & AIWrote code in 2009. First SaaS in 2012. Writing code again in 2026.
0350kreaders / monthB2B blog I built at Carrot Quest.
042.5kTG subscribersChannel on going from 0 to 1.
/ 03 / trajectory
Seventeen years. One line.
- 2024 → nowFounder & CEO · Dashly.ioAI SDR for inbound B2B SaaS funnels · $252K → $1M ARR goal
- 2024 → nowFounder & Advisor · Carrot QuestCo-founder · scaled to $3M ARR
- 2023 → nowAngel / Mentor / Advisor · IndependentC-level in EdTech & MarTech
- 2024 → nowSolo maker · AI toolingGPT agents, voice bots, no-code
- 2015 → 2024CEO · Carrot Quest0 → 1 → product-market fit
- 2009 → 2015CEO · Anivers StudioEnterprise: Sberbank, Rosneft
/ 04 / artifacts
HTML, decks, essays.
Made with Claude.
An artifact is a thought caught before it drifted off. Five areas I work in: CEO, marketing, product, AI, vibecoding.
01 · MarketingTool
SEO on Claude skills: 41 tools
The whole workflow stage by stage, from strategy to the AI gate.
A working set of 41 Claude skills for SEO, sorted into eight stages: strategy and keyword core, briefs, page creation, rewrites, technical audit, GEO for AI search, quality control, and adjacent mechanics. One line per skill on what it actually does. Inside: three orchestrators that run a whole chain end to end, and the content-ai-check gate that nothing ships without.
2026 · Augustread →
02 · MarketingDeck
B2B marketing trends 2026
13 trends across 16 sources. A talk in 32 slides.
Four chapters that follow the buyer: where they find you now, when the decision is already made, how you get picked among lookalikes, and what all of it does inside your own company. Inside: 68% of Google searches end without a click, 85% of citations in AI answers come from somewhere other than your site, 96% of companies are invisible in unbranded questions, a blind test on 100 marketing leaders scores 1.86 out of 5 where random guessing scores 1.0, and optimizing for CTR sends 38% of budget into the two worst pipeline quartiles. Built on surveys of buyers themselves rather than marketers' opinions about the market: TrustRadius, G2, Gartner, 6sense. Every number on a slide carries its source and sample size. It closes with a seven-step plan ordered by payback.
2026 · Augustread →
03 · MarketingEssay
Where the agent ends and the salesperson begins
A conversation with Boris Nikolaenko about B2B sales.
An hour of arguing with Boris Nikolaenko about what in B2B sales can already be handed to an agent and what can't. He's built sales teams for twenty years and runs audits. I build the agents that offload those teams. Inside: reps with six months of zero deals, 54-minute first-response times, contact-attempt distribution across 1,302 leads, the WOWBlogger case with 82% into a booked meeting, and the twist — the dashboard that fired the sales team.
2026 · Augustread →
04 · TravelTool
China: Beijing · Suzhou · Shanghai
An 11-day itinerary — with photos from the trip.
A personal guide to a China trip (Jul 9–19): a day-by-day Beijing → Suzhou → Shanghai itinerary, lodging, flights and trains, budget, visa, where to eat, shopping and outlets, the metro — with photos from the trip.
2026 · Julyread →
05 · VibecodingEssay
Three sets of sales skills for Claude: compared
What's inside, for whom, when to use, what to adapt.
A neutral comparison of three open-source sales-skill sets for Claude Code (sales-skills/sales, zubair-trabzada, louisblythe): what's inside each, who it's for, when to install it, and what to adapt. A head-to-head table plus a “which set for which situation” matrix.
2026 · v 1.0read →
06 · AITool
Grading AI skills in hiring
G0→G3, 5 dimensions, 17 questions. No artifact, no offer.
How we grade candidates' AI skills: four grades G0–G3, five dimensions (Delegation, Description, Discernment, Building, Diligence), per-role bars, 17 questions, and a live practical block. Built on the Zapier v2 rubric and Anthropic's 4D framework. The rule: no artifact (prompt, automation, agent) and no number — no offer.
2026 · v 1.0read →
07 · CEOTool
Hiring A-players: process, evaluation, onboarding
12-stage funnel. ABC matrix. AI inside, the call stays human.
A full hiring workflow: kickoff, sourcing, ABC-matrix evaluation (the “Who” method by Smart & Street), interviews, offer, and onboarding. 12 stages — now with AI inside: candidate scoring, auto-linking records, prepping onboarding in minutes. The final call always stays human.
2026 · v 1.0read →
08 · AITool
Meeting pipeline: Fireflies → Telegram
Every meeting routes itself to the right team
Record a call in Fireflies, then zero manual work. A cron every 15 min classifies transcripts, files them into per-team repos, and pings Telegram. Unsure → it asks with one tap; a Cloudflare Worker on a Claude tool-use loop instantly routes the meeting or saves a rule.
2026 · v 1.0read →
09 · CEODeck
I have an idea. B2B SaaS. What now?
Traction map: from idea to $1M ARR. StartupCamp Dilijan.
Go-to-market for B2B SaaS, drawn from building Carrot Quest and Dashly. Seven stages from idea to $1M ARR — each gated by one concrete artifact. The 4 mistakes engineering teams make, what an MVP really is, and exactly what I'd do by hand in 5 days from scratch today.
2026 · StartupCampread →
10 · VibecodingTool
Zero to commit. A hackathon participant guide.
Mac and Windows, mixed Git experience.
Set up GitHub, Cursor, and Claude Code in 30 minutes. Team workflow in one repo: branches, PRs, conflicts. Deploy to Vercel. Includes a downloadable Claude system prompt that walks a person through the setup step by step.
2026 · v 1.0read →
11 · MarketingEssay
Content Hubs. A Field Guide.
Four models. Eight rules. Anti-patterns.
What a content hub is, and how it isn't a blog. Four models: Hub-and-Spoke, Content Library, Topic Gateway, Content Database. Eight rules that hold a hub together. Eight anti-patterns that break it. A decision tree for picking the right model.
2026 · v 1.0read →
12 · ProductTool
Dmitrii Ive. Design System v 1.0.
Colors, type, components, voice.
Full spec: 10 color tokens across two themes, three font families, six components, and a copyable starter CSS. Take it, and build a new project in the same visual language.
2026 · v 1.0read →
13 · VibecodingEssay
Claude Skills. A conceptual guide.
What it is, when to use one, how it's wired.
Skills sit between prompts, project knowledge, and MCP. A folder of instructions Claude loads only when the task matches. Six situations where a skill pays off. What to do and what to skip.
2026 · v 1.0read →
14 · VibecodingEssay
Vibecoding with Claude Code
Six observations from a CEO
How I build and rebuild whole products in a conversation with Claude. Context beats prompts, sessions beat one-off queries, and where it all breaks.
2026 · v 0.1read →
15 · AIDeck
AI SDR: funnel economics
12 months of lessons from Dashly
$252K ARR, $1M target by 2026. What works in inbound funnels powered by AI agents. And what doesn't.
Coming soonread →
16 · CEODeck
0 → $3M ARR with no funding
Carrot Quest, a ten-year retro
Bootstrapped, profitable, 35% YoY. What I'd repeat, what I'd skip, and why a CEO keeps working after the exit.
Coming soonread →
17 · MarketingDeck
Inbound funnel teardown
From SEO to handshake
How a blog with 50k readers/month becomes SQLs, then revenue. Content, scoring, weekly rituals.
Coming soonread →
18 · ProductDeck
Product Research · JTBD as craft
Based on Product Research Book
A compact take on my product research book. Custdev, hypotheses, finding the real pain.
Coming soonopen ↗
The catalogue keeps growing. New HTML artifacts go into public/artifacts/ with an entry added to lib/artifacts.ts.
/ 05 / how I help
Partner. Mentor. Advisor.
Teams that drive themselves
What changes when the CEO isn't in every meeting. Roles, rituals, culture. None of the HR fluff.
Marketing that pulls leads
Inbound that actually works in B2B SaaS. Positioning, content, traffic. The same stack pulled 50k readers a month at Carrot Quest. I'll show you how it's wired.
Sales that close
Your first sales hire and their KPIs. Why marketing and sales still don't talk in your company. What syncs them with two recurring meetings a week.
Product-market fit
Custdev without self-deception. Hypotheses you can run in a week. Channels where customers are already paying.
/ 06 / writing
Channel on going from 0 to 1.
Telegram · ive_from_0_to_1 ↗
My book on product research. JTBD, custdev, hypotheses.
Product Research Book ↗
spoke on stages
Netology · EcomExpo · FRII · RIF · Product Mindset · Product Camp · ScrumTrek · Epic Growth
/ 07 / connect